Today, as I was preparing for my upcoming 3+ week trip to the Black Sea/South Caucasus region in a few days, it dawned on me that I have not spent any significant time in a majority non-English speaking country in almost four years.
This came as sort of a shock because, for the eight years prior to my four years of traveling/living in English-speaking countries, I traveled almost exclusively to those where little to no English was spoken at all. Or so I thought.
These past four years, however, have been spent living and traveling in Uganda, Australia, and Liberia. Not that I minded that my work took me to those places at all. I loved living in Uganda and Liberia has been both challenging and refreshing. And Australia? Well, the fact that I reverently caress the island continent on the map that hangs in my office every morning and whisper, "I love you...and I WILL be back!" might give you some indication of how I feel about the place.
But now, with Romania, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan coming fast down the pike, I realized that it was time to bring out my dusty list of things to do/not to do when traveling in non-English speaking countries. This is all, of course, based on personal experience. Sometimes incredibly humiliating and painful personal experience.
So, the list.
1. Just because you can't understand them, it doesn't mean they can't understand you.
This, of course, is a no-brainer but I fall for it every time. After two or so weeks of walking around with virtually no understanding of what is being said around me, I magically come to the assumption that the same must be true in reverse! Nevermind that English is, oh, I don't know, like the most common second language in the world...I manage to forget that and begin voicing, out loud, the thoughts and opinions that are in my head thinking that no one can possibly understand me because, DUH, I can't understand THEM.
This has led to me nearly being beaten to death with a suitcase by a rather large Ukrainian woman on a train once after I voiced the query to my traveling companion as to whether she might have been stuffed into her pink, latex hot pants the way a sausage is forced into casing.
Or...the time in the beer hall in a chilly Eastern European outpost where I queried, to myself in this case, "Is it me or does it smell like a combination of beer, cabbage and unwashed ass in this joint?" To which the sweet, innocent-looking older gentleman sitting at the table next to me replied, "Oh, it's you alright."
2. Talking out loud to yourself to provide your own company makes you look like a crazy person---no matter the geographic locale.
This is actually kind of a subset of Rule #1 but it does carry its own set of unique repercussions. As above, when you are completely oblivious to what is being said around you---and you can't read a damn thing and have to rely almost exclusively on body language as hints for social interaction---it gets lonely. Maybe you get a touch homesick, particularly if you are from a culture like mine where we have information blaring at us 24/7, and you suddenly decide that YOU truly are your own best friend! And entertainment. And shit, since no one can understand you anyway, why not just start talking to yourself out loud?
This has come with the price tag, on multiple occasions, of suddenly becoming aware that people were giving me a wide berth on city streets and public transportation. Once, in Cambodia, I was deeply engaged in a titillating conversation with myself about why the crown prince had chosen to become a ballerina of all things---and the merit of such a move---when I looked down to see a tiny child peering at me with her head cocked to the side. Although I am not a huge "kid person" this one was rather adorable so I started to bend down to her level when her mother, I presume, came bolting out of nowhere, grabbed the girl's arm, and dragged her away with the alarming forcefulness usually reserved for when you discover your child is talking to a convicted pedophile. Or a crazy person. She shouted a few things to me in Cambodian which, of course, I couldn't understand, but her final act of pointing up the street to the local pharmacist shop conveyed a message that language could not: Clearly, I was off my medication.
3. If you are going to make an earnest purchase concerning an item that could affect your physical appearance or digestive system, guessing is never a good idea.
One of the wonders of travel, for me, is all the exotic crap one can acquire in the process. Pun sometimes intended. While I normally can identify most items by their physical appearance or some picture on the label, food items and cosmetic products hold a world of peril for someone who does not read or understand the language.
This was the case in France a few years ago where I was vacationing with my ex. I had forgotten hair gel (I know, this seems minor but my hair is a mass of revolutionary follicles needing to be subdued on a regular basis) and needed to find a French version of such a product. I can read a little, and by this I mean a very little, French so I figured that this particular purchase should be fairly straightforward. Which is how I ended up purchasing dry skin cream that I found unusually... rich...when I was applying it for the next few days. Finally, my ex asked me if I had suddenly developed a hormonal problem that included profound grease production. My hair was so slick that a floating cigarette ash could ignite it. Ashamed, I finally asked a French friend what, EXACTLY, was in my hair gel only to find out it was not hair gel at all. (Note: There are no pictures from my time in France anywhere to be found for this reason...I looked like Tito Jackson while visiting the Louvre).
As for food, let me just say this...what the HELL is wrong Russians putting mothballs in the candy aisle? Or maybe it wasn't the candy aisle afterall. Maybe it was indeed the mothball aisle. But who the hell makes mothballs look like hard candy? That's my question. Needless to say, you don't ever, ever want to eat a Russian mothball. I will leave it at that. (Note: There is not a picture of the Hermitage from my time spent in Russia anywhere to be found for this reason...mothballs are devastating on the digestive system.)
4. Sometimes it pays to take the guided tour.
I hate guided tours. Let me just put that out there right away. I am also one of those travelers who generally eschews seeing the normal tourist sites in favor of going to local markets and restaurants as my love of food and shopping generally outweighs that of art or architecture most days. I know this is very backward of me but I DO try to see the big items (Louvre, Vatican, Great Reclining Buddha, Great Wall of China, Great Barrier Reef, etc..). Nevertheless, I get to know a place best through its markets and its food so that's where I normally do my exploring. This is all fine and good but eventually I tend to run into an enthusiastic local or a "friend of a friend"who insists on showing me something off the beaten path. Some gem or another that is unknown to tourists. This usually, and by this I mean 75% of the time, turns out to be wonderful and I get to see things others don't. Occasionally, however, it is disastrous.
Which is how I ended up in a twelfth century Georgian bathhouse at midnight with a gang of Russian gun smugglers and their prostitutes. And dining on the side of a mountain in Kosovo with a wanted war criminal who casually ticked off his kills over a splendid fish stew. And trapped in a car for six hours in Costa Rica with a friend who insisted, INSISTED, that the restaurant was "just right around this curve!!" And evaluating the quality of cows---internally and with rubber gloves included---at a bride ceremony in South Sudan. And nearly trapped in a former concentration camp in Poland on the night of Easter Sunday. And eating a half-formed baby chicken at someone's mother's house in the Philippines. And falling off a motorcycle in Belgium into a snow bank after taking a "short" ride of eight hours in the middle of January. And attending circumcision ceremony for a twelve year old (TWELVE YEAR OLD!!!) boy in Ivory Coast. And nearly shooting a Brazilian general's 94 year old mother after I was encouraged to "just try that beauty" in a semi-remote Amazon outpost. (The "beauty" was the gun, not the mother).
I could go on...but I won't. Have these experiences shaped me and made me a more well-rounded person? Probably. But do I feel that I could likely have saved a lot of personal trauma and peril to myself, and others, by having just taken the guided tour? Absolutely.
5. The U.S. is the only backward-ass country that doesn't use the metric system and I should really learn how to deal with that by now.
I have no idea why Americans hate the metric system so much but it totally screws you when you go abroad, particularly in non-English speaking countries. I really can't get a handle on why we seem to be the only remaining country to measure things in miles, pounds, feet, yards and Fahrenheit but it bites me in the ass each and every time. No matter how many places I have been or lived.
The problem is completely intuitive. When you are raised your whole life to measure things in one way and suddenly you are forced to do math to figure out the very basics of life, things get messy. Which is how I ended up misjudging the distance between where I was staying in a lovely, but remote, Panamanian beach town and the nearest city where goods could be procured. I read "feet" instead of kilometers and ended up walking for three hours through the rainforest in 110 degree (Fahrenheit!!) heat before rolling into town looking like Rastafarian hillbilly (see above about the hair thing). I was so sunburnt, dehydrated, and delirious that when a local shop owner came running out carrying a bottle of water, I actually told her that I loved her. She then called both the ambulance AND the police.
Or the time I decided to bake cookies for my teaching colleagues in Hungary and misread milometers for ounces in the recipe and ended up putting so much baking powder into the dough that rather than gifting them with a sweet treat, I gave them the power of self-propulsion. In the same country, I also memorably told my class that I weighed 120 kilograms to which a rather outspoken student said, "Well, at least you are carrying it well!"
And thus concludes my list of things I must either avoid or remember to remember in the coming days. This time, luckily, I have written it down. It seems simple enough but when you see pictures of me on Facebook wearing a tank top in the Siberian winter, dining on fertilizer, or being slapped into a straight jacket for frightening innocent children...don't laugh.
I am doing this so you don't have to.
